David Risher: Imagine if you're the guy who one day is rifling his couch for change to get a burger, and the next is cutting pieces out of living human brains. Quite a transition. But I read about it in a book by a neurosurgeon.

I like well-lit, open workspaces more than I dislike them. My space in the Google SF office for two and a half years was a semi-closed half-cubicle farm where natural light was somewhat blocked out, and that was depressing as heck. I loved the days where I'd go to HQ and be able to just feed off the energy of my team. More good happened from chance meetings that offset the possibility of distraction.

I do understand the need to tune out background noise. My first job after I graduated was in a true cubicle farm. My experience was that there'd be less random visual distraction, but people were absolutely more inclined to stop by "just to say hi". Not to mention, they wouldn't pick up on cues that you want to get back to work. I suppose that's what the break area is for. But isn't it easier to look around, see who is looking up, make eye contact and the "let's get coffee" sign?

I believe the issues with open workspaces and even closed workspaces causing productivity loss are almost all symptomatic of culture. Neither are going to be perfect, we just have to keep improving what we have and deal with what is out of our capability to change in the short term.

Bonus: I know the note about leaving exactly at 5:04pm is tongue in cheek, but that almost sounds like the author is a clock watcher type ...

Steve Anderson: Here's an idea. Maybe different people do better in different environments. Just like some people are more introverted or more extroverted. I do much better in smaller quieter spaces. Maybe getting it wrong is thinking there is a one size fits all approach that is objectively better.

Michael Galpin: 100% disagree, though admittedly I think the type of work you do is the most significant factor here. In my experience, the "programming zone" is very real, especially for the most productive engineers and thus I prefer a working environment that maximizes "getting into the zone". I think Spolsky nailed this a long time ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html.

Also, when I read that article I interpreted the "12 pairs of eyes I felt judging my 5:04 p.m. departure time" was a statement about privacy or lack thereof. A lack of privacy made the author feel more self-conscious about leaving work before his co-workers did. Again I'm definitely speaking from a software engineer's perspective, but being judge on your productivity and quality of work is much more important than being judged on your work hours. I think the author felt that the open office plan detracted from that, as there is an implied peer pressure to work the same hours as your co-workers.

Ikai Lan: +Steve Anderson​ FWIW I think your point also applies to remote work. Not everyone is going to be at their best in a distributed team.

+Michael Galpin​ chalk that up to our different styles, I suppose. I write code 90% of the time now (other 40% of my time is spent fighting Hadoop or EC2 or what have you) and the sentiment is the same as before. I'm energized by seeing other folks being productive. I can and have also worked by myself, but I've noticed that where this is the most beneficial for me is when I have to tackle an ugly, not fun task. Left to my own devices, I tend to deprioritize those things.

Offices don't solve the face time issue as the author implies. I have friends who are lawyers who are deathly afraid of not being in their office late at night for fear that they will be seen as slackers. They learn alternate routes out to not be seen leaving by partners or even their peers. It's crazy town in that world. I viewed many of the authors' issues as largely cultural. Or maybe the bigger takeaway is this: don't just copy what other people are doing (tech companies, open floor plan) because it works for them. Canary, trial, iterate and rollback if needed.

I'm not going to argue with commenters, but it's my experience that points 2, 6 and 8 are laughable (I am a heavy Python user and fan). Particularly egregious is #8. CPython's concurrency's is a lightweight compared to Java, and to date I have not met anyone working in a Jython shop. Well ... we currently utilize Apache Pig and it's Python support via Jython, but that doesn't count.

Andrew “The” Bolt: Agreed. #8 is a straw-man argument. "Myth: Python has poor support for doing the specific subset of multi-processing that I'm going to argue is easy to solve in Python" Not everyone has the luxury of needing to solve embarrassingly-parallel request processing.

8 isn't stated well - I think they point they're trying to make is "you can build concurrent systems which make full use of your resources in python" - but yeah, python is not the correct language if you want to do more "traditional" concurrency etc - you do need very major architectural changes to the system to make use of those resources (e.g. re-architect to use message passing etc).

Honestly: I've never come across a situation where python's concurrency support was what let me down though ..

- if you're doing concurrent processing to avoid resource contention then it's support is fine.

- If you're doing parallel work for performance in a non trivial problem then you're only conceptually looking at ~ a 5x performance improvement available from concurrency anyway (on a 2x 8-core machine, with the extra overhead for increased fetches over NUMA, reduced cache efficiency etc). You can relatively trivially get a 25x performance boost for most of these kinds of problems (if they're data structure or numerical kinds of problems) by fairly trivial C extensions, and if you need more than that then I think you should really be re-architecting your solution..

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I LOVE JetBrains IDEs. This is for you iOS developers that are sick of Xcode.

Also, I just downloaded an evaluation copy of WebStorm to fool around with its AngularJS integration, and that is also quite good. The only language I work in extensively nowadays where I prefer Sublime Text seems to be Python.